Great, Good, and Divided: The Politics of Public Space in Rio De Janeiro
2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 30; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-9906.2008.00417.x
ISSN1467-9906
Autores Tópico(s)Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance
ResumoABSTRACT:At a time when cities, particularly large Latin American cities, are increasingly polarized and overcome with violence, and public space has long been pronounced dead, an exceptionally vibrant public realm survives in Rio de Janeiro. In the elite beach neighborhood of Ipanema, residents spend a large part of their free time in public: on the street corner, in bars, and on the beach. Ipanema has a proliferation of what Ray Oldenburg calls "third places" where neighbors, friends, and colleagues plug into and out of an ongoing public social life. But below the idyllic surface lies a conflictual social space stratified along race and class lines. Through an analysis of the discursive construction of the beach, the politics of beach access, and a 15-year old tradition of beach riots, I question the notion—popularized by Oldenburg and others—of public space as the location of an organic civil society that greases the wheels of commerce, promotes democracy, and solves its own problems in the common interest. Rather, I argue that Rio's famous beach neighborhoods are a key arena of the public sphere where the terms of Rio's unjust social order are challenged, negotiated, and largely reproduced. Nevertheless, Ipanema's public space represents political possibility for the otherwise excluded majority. Notes1 The article draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Rio de Janeiro during 1996, 1998, and 1999, and updated through scholarly and media accounts available through late 2007. Systematic study of the beach was limited to Ipanema and the Posto 6 section of Copacabana, chosen because of their symbolic importance in Rio and beyond, and because of the diversity of beach users found in this area. How to study the social life of 3 kilometers of beach that is commonly occupied by hundreds of thousands of people on a sunny weekend day presented a challenge. Understanding the role of informal beer vendors and the associated ad hoc social groups known as turmas suggested an approach. I conducted interviews with 54 barraqueiros, as stationary beer vendors are known, which accounted for the majority of regular barraqueiros and most of the beach socializing space along this 3 kilometers of beach. After each interview I asked the barraqueiro to introduce me to one of his or her regular customers, which typically allowed me to interview a group of beach goers sitting in a circle on the sand, so that I effectively conducted an ethnography of 54 beach spots. Interviews were open ended, typically lasting 20 minutes but on occasion lasting hours. Sometimes, I would ask for a referral to another group in the same area, thus following a modified snowball sampling approach. Occasionally, I would return with follow-up questions on another day and in a few cases developed ongoing relationships with groups. This approach allowed me to sample the spectrum of beach goers and zones identified in the media and in everyday discourse (see below). It does, however, limit my study to the dominant beach activity during a particular time-space window: beach socializing in the middle band of sand out of reach of the waves and usually removed a distance from the sidewalk, during the sunny summer months of the year.2 These works also stress the importance of embeddedness, voluntarism, and associationalism, and argue that multiple social ties and face-to-face contacts between people help to build the trust necessary for successful economic development and functioning democracy (see CitationWeber, 1946; CitationGranovetter, 1985; CitationPutnam, 1993, Citation2000; CitationPutnam, Feldstein, & Cohen, 2003).3 Income inequality rose significantly in Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s and then gradually in the 1990s (see CitationMelo, 1995; CitationPrefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 2004). Social well being can be measured in different ways. One recent study of work and income concludes: "Brazilian workers, and particularly those that live in the metropolises, have become poorer since the 1980s in terms of income from work, and more vulnerable in terms of the stability of those jobs. The worsening of these objective conditions are compounded by changing expectations of social improvement by way of education or experience on the part of the middle and popular classes" (CitationObservatorio das Metrópoles, 2005, p. II.2.1).4 Data for 1983 to 1998 are from a study conducted by the University of São Paulo based on data from the System of Information on Mortality (SIM) of the federal Ministry of Health and data from the State Secretaries of Public Security (CitationCarneiro, 2000). Data for 1999 to 2004 are from the DATASUS database of the Federal Ministry of Health available at http://tabnet.datasus.gov.br/tabdata/cadernos/cadernosmap.htm, which was accessed on August 13, 2008 (CitationDATASUS, 2006). Health data are generally considered more accurate than crime statistics because many homicides are not reported to the police. Municipal numbers for both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro do not take into account much higher murder rates in poor suburbs that are technically independent municipalities, but function as part of the metropolitan regions of these two cities. Some of the most violent cities in Brazil are suburbs of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (CitationPrefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 2005).5 U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports. Available at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_08_ny.html, accessed on August 13, 2008.6 DaMatta's comments are from a newspaper column published a year earlier (CitationDaMatta, 2006)7 Faixa de Areia by Pedro Luis and Alexandre Pereira, theme song of the film by the same name (CitationKallmann & Silva, 2007).8 Goldstein makes a similar argument about what she calls "color-blind erotic democracy," where poor black women in Brazil strategically buy into the idea of racial democracy because it provides some limited possibility for social mobility (CitationGoldstein, 1999). CitationCarvalho (2007, p. 330) talks about a kind of self-censorship where people choose to paint a rosy picture of social relations on the beach rather than talk about "coisas ruins (bad things)."9 Available at http://www.ipanema.com/rio/basics/e/people.htm, accessed August 2008.10 Available at http://www.ipanema.com/pictours/leblon.htm, accessed August 2008.11 CitationAllen (1967) quoted in CitationOldenburg (1989, p. 24)12 Farias traces the history of the beach turma to gangs of middle-class youths in 1950s Copacabana, who were associated with particular cross-streets of the beach, such as the Miguel Lemos turma (CitationFarias, 2006, pp. 47–50).13 Unless otherwise identified, quotes are from my interviews conducted in 1999. I have identified interviewees by the nick names or first names they gave me, and have only substituted them with fictitious names in a couple of cases where I thought anonymity was warranted.14 See CitationFarias (2006, pp. 170–173) and CitationKallmann & Silva (2007) for a discussion of flirting and romance on the beach.15 A Rio city government study lists the Zona Sul neighborhoods as the richest in the city, but also some of the internally most unequal in the city because of the favelas. The Gini coefficient for the city was 0.62 in 2000. While most neighborhoods had a Gini coefficient in the rage of 0.45 to 0.50, Ipanema's score was 0.57. Ipanema had an average per capita monthly income of R$2,484 in 2000, Copacabana R$1,618, Lagoa R$2,984, and Leblon R$2,502. By comparison, the Zona Sul favela of Rocinha had an average monthly income of R$209, while the average for the city is R$447 (CitationPrefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 2004).16 This mental map of the beach was generally given to me by people who used the Zona Sul beaches regularly, who possibly lived in the Zona Sul, and who were speaking from a nearby perspective. As we get closer to the beach, people's mental maps become more nuanced, and as we get further from the beach people's mental maps become more blurred and stereotyped. One young lower-middle class woman from the Zona Norte neighborhood of Meier, who used to go to the beach in Copacabana occasionally, asked me, "Posto 9, that's a gay crowd over there, right?"17 Brizola died in 2004. Other policies that endeared Brizola to the poor and infuriated the wealthy include insisting that the police respect civil rights in the favelas ("not letting the police climb the hills"), setting up a system of schools for the poor called CIEPs, and attempting to build swimming pools and elevators in favelas.18 Brizola attempted to make the favela complex Cantagalo-Pavão-Pavãozinho a model, providing services, infrastructure, and property rights. He then toured dignitaries through the favela including Jimmy Carter, François Mitterrand, and Pelé (CitationCôrtes, 1985). I also met Cantagalo residents who were sharply critical of Brizola. A 66-year-old Cantagalo man told me, "Brizola was a disaster for Rio de Janeiro. He was a cheap populist."19 See discussion of Piscinão de Ramos below.20 The aggression toward elite women also reflects different gender rules in the Zona Sul, which is more cosmopolitan and where women famously dress in skimpy bikinis on the beach, as compared to the Zona Norte where women's sexuality is controlled in a more traditional patriarchal way.21 The metrô has long run on Sundays during Carnival and for other special events. Metrô administrators tested running the system on regular Sundays in 2000, but the service was not permanently established until February 2004.22 "Filme Institutional," MetrôRio, March 2005, available at http://www.metrorio.com.br/campanhas/Filme%20Institucional.wmv, accessed May 2007.23 O Dia, 21 October 1992, cited in CitationFrancisco (2003).24 For an environmental history of the Guanabara Bay, see CitationSedrez (2004).25 My account of the 1992 arrastão draws on newspaper and magazine reports and the following scholarly sources: CitationBanck (1994), CitationCunha (2001), CitationFarias (2006), CitationFrancisco (2003), CitationGomes (2002), CitationLeite (2000), CitationLurie (2000), and CitationRoth-Gordon (2002).26 Gangs of poor kids who fight at funk dances and bring their rivalries to the beach. This was widely seen as the immediate cause of the 1992 arrastão and many of the arrastões of the early 1990s (see CitationVianna, 1988; CitationLurie, 2000).27 Such a move is possible in Rio where a majority of the population have black ancestors but where race is a flexible category allowing people to claim different identities under different circumstances. For discussions of race in Brazil see CitationHanchard (1999), CitationSheriff (2003), CitationSkidmore (1993 [1974]), and CitationSansone (2003).
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